Saturday, 14 May 2016

Not Just Wrong, But On The Wrong Side

Or if it’s not fully zombified yet, its members are all too
busy cleaning their AR-15s and posting racist comments on YouTube to vote for a
progressive.

That is, if they’re not already on the Trump bandwagon, which they
probably are.

At least that’s what the Democratic Party wants you to
believe.

Last Tuesday, Bernie Sanders won the 93.7 percent white
state of West Virginia with ease,beating Clintonamong men and women, young and old.

The week prior, he cruised tovictory in Indiana,
despite no longer apparently being a serious contender for the nomination.

Leftists were ecstatic: a socialist winning over middle
America!

Mainstream observers were less enthused. In fact, they were
quick to dismiss Bernie’s victory on this very basis.

They saw an old, infirm,
and irrelevant group thwarting their desired coalition of what Michael Lindcalls business-friendly “urban
cosmopolitanism.”

This same coalition helped Clinton sail to victory in New
York: the wealthy Park Avenue scions marching to (separate) ballot boxes with
their brothers and sisters in arms — East New York’s poor — many of whom no
doubt safely Ubered the former back to their townhouses in time for dinner.

Here in the middle of all this were the voters of West
Virginia — one of the poorest and whitest states in the country, a place that
repeatedly elected a former Klansman to the Senate — asserting their material
interests.

In the ongoing Clinton coronation, they were about as welcome as a
case of black lung.

But it isn’t just the Sanders campaign zombie that liberal
pundits are desperately trying to stamp out. It’s thewhite working class itself.

With Clinton’s nomination a lock, liberals have become even
more furious and dismissive of white workers.

Commenting on Sanders’s West
Virginia victory, they were quick to point out that a felon running against
Obama in the same state in 2012 got nearly half as many votes.

They crowed
about how some of both Bernie and Clinton’s voters said Trump was their real
number one choice, and much was made of how Sanders overwhelmingly won voters
who want “less liberal” policies than Obama’s.

Conveniently lost in the noise is the fact that Sanders won
an even bigger share of voters who want “more liberal” ones.

The media takeaway was clear: somehow, someway, West
Virginia’s vote for a Jewish socialist Brooklyn native was a vote for racism.

“I don’t want to say it,” said Chris Matthews on election night “but West
Virginian voters are, you know — conservative on social issues — but there’s
another word for that. . .”

MSNBC’s Alex Seitz-Waldclaimed, “Many attributed
the outcome to West Virginia voters’ discomfort with Obama’s race. The state is
one of the whitest in the country.”

To be fair, it’s now widely known that
Hillary Clinton keeps hot sauce in her purse at all times.

These kinds of statements are the name of the game for
today’s Democratic elite.

The party has established a clear line on the white wage-earning
class: they’re all either dying (demographically or literally), irrelevant in an increasingly
nonwhite country, or so hopelessly racist they can go off themselves with a
Miller High Life-prescription-painkiller cocktail for all they care.

As liberal
hero and Sanders nemesis Barney Frank put it a couple of weeks ago, “the
likelihood that fifty-eight-year-old coal miners are going to become the solar
engineers of the future is nil.”

The problem with this line is not just that it’s gross and
elitist — it’s that it’s not even true.

The working class is bigger than ever,
is still really white, and isbroadly supportiveof a progressive populist agenda.

It just turns out that the Democratic Party outside of
Sanders isn’t too interested in that agenda.

And it’s even less interested in
thatspecific chunk of
the working class that forces liberals to confront head on the naked brutality
of the economic system they cherish.

To no one’s surprise, that’s not a confrontation that
brings out the best in them.

Somehow liberal pundits have gotten it into their heads
that white workers — perhaps thanks to Fox News’s racist dispatches — are just
an aggrieved, pissed off, outnumbered minority.

But their particular disgust is
just a stand-in for a more generalized anti-working-class politics.

No matter
how you slice it, the working class — while not quite Wes-Anderson-movie-white
— is really damn white.

While theEconomic Policy Instituteprojects thatthe US working class will be
49.6 percent “non-hispanic white” by 2032, 77 percent of all minimum wage (or
below) workers today are white.

Half are white women, who it should be noted
joined young working-class women of color as an enthusiastic coreof Sanders’s base.

And as Tamara Draut
shows in her new bookSleeping
Giant— which stresses the
diversity of the new working class — 63 percent of all workers without a
bachelor’s degree are still non-Latino white.

Instead of acknowledging the size and importance of this
part of the electorate, Democratic Party elites have simply constructed a new
narrative to suit their interests — a narrative that was on display after West
Virginia.

Following Sanders’s win asignificantchunk of the punditocracy came to the
conclusion, mostly by abusing the hell out of exit polls, that a vote for the
Jewish socialist was actually a vote for white supremacy.

After decades of being told white workers would never
support socialism because they’re racist, we’re now told that they support the
socialist candidatebecausethey are racist.

Yes, this is where
liberals are in the year 2016.

How did we get here?

How did we get to the point at which
universalist, social-democratic politics — the antithesis of Reagan’s welfare
queen and the very set of policies we’ve long been told white workers would
never support out of racist spite — have become the last gasp of white
supremacy?

Where a working-class program — that would disproportionately help
women and people of color — is the new white flight?

It’s really a tale of two economic programs and two kinds
of politics: Sanders versus the Democratic Party, represented by their
standard-bearer, Hillary Clinton.

The Sanders program is a recognizably working-class one:
higher minimum wage, free college for all, labor unionism, and a re-regulation
of finance with steep taxes on the one percent. And his actual politics go far
beyond that.

He preaches the necessity and righteousness of class war,
calls out our oligarchs by name and — in the case of hisImmokalee
farmworkers adbertisement — asks us all to question “who benefits
from this exploitation?”

This politics puts Sanders considerably to the left of
every major Western social-democratic or labor party leader, short of Jeremy
Corbyn.

Howard Dean and Bill Bradley he is most certainly not.

The Clinton program — which is the kind of politics that’s
defined the Democratic Party and American liberalism for decades — is also a
class program.

But to paraphrase Adolph Reed, it’s a politics that few would
recognize as aworking-classone.

Despite off-the-charts wealth inequality, Democratic Party
liberals have been concerned not with an egalitarian reckoning to unite the
have-nots against the haves but with inclusion: bringing different “interest
groups” into the professional class while managing everyone else’s expectations
downward.

This kind of “inclusion” politics — the chance at climbing
one of a tiny handful of rickety ladders to the top — is the only economic
program the Democratic Party mainstream is selling to those not already in the
upper tiers.

Sure, this politics is better than nothing.

But asRalph Milibandput
it, “access to positions of power by members of the subordinate classes does
not change the fact of domination: it only changes its personnel.”

Standing outside of this shift, unmoved and — as the
Democratic Party sees it — ungrateful,is the white working class.

Not just
those silver-haired remnants from the unionized, manufacturing heyday whose
jobs have been offshored or,more likely, de-unionized, but the vast swath
who’ve been forced to adjust to the new norm of low-wage, flexible,
service-sector hell.

Even with the college degree and boatload of debt needed
to obtain it.

But where Clintonlowersexpectations for this demographic,
Bernie raises them.

While a shockingly aggrieved Clinton angrily declares that
health insurance as a right will “never, ever come to pass,” Bernie runs on a
platform of Medicare for all.

While the essence of the Clinton Democratic Party has been
to take what social-democratic parties had traditionally pursued as rights —
health care, education, housing, etc. — and return them to the market, another
Democratic candidate is telling the working class that itdoesn’thave to be satisfiedwith scraps.

But even with such “dangerous” and “unrealistic”
expectations why do elite liberals seem to focus so particularly on white
wage-earners?

Part of the explanation is that unlike with the white
working class, many of the hardships workers of color face fit neatly within an
acceptable liberal narrative about what’s wrong with our society: racism.

And
when racism can be blamed, capitalism can be exonerated.

Liberals can delude themselves into believing that it is
nothing more than the accumulation of individual prejudices stashed away in the
minds of powerful white people that has destroyed black and brown communities
in Detroit, Ferguson, and Chicago’s South Side.

Class stratification, capital flight, and the war against
organized labor are thus sidestepped completely.

The liberal elite is spared
from having to question the fundamental injustices of capitalism.

Unfortunately, the miseries, hardships, and exploitation of
white workers don’t fit into an easy capital-friendly framework.

Liberals then
have two options: blame theindividual moral failingsof white workers or call into question
the very nature of capitalism itself.

Guess which one they choose.

More and more, liberals just
point and scream: “racist.”

Certainly, many members of the white working class
reject the Obama/Clinton program of inclusion and meritocracy for reactionary
reasons (and vote Republican), many more are pretty lukewarm about it.

When
polled, they support far more egalitarian policies like the kind associated
with the Sanders campaign. But when it comes down to it,few of them show upon election day.

And frankly, it’s hard to blame them.

There’s not much in
it for them. There’s no political party looking out for their interests — only
ones telling them to do more with less.

We’re socialists. We don’t talk about workers all the time
because they’re the most exploited or because there’s something uniquely heroic
and noble about them. There isn’t.

Theworking class is centralto a meaningful progressive politics
because they have the numbers, the economic incentive and the potential power
to halt capital in its tracks — to check the power of our ruling class and
build a truly democratic society out of this miserable oligarchy we all find
ourselves stuck in today.

It becomes clearer every year, particularly with Sanders’s
popularity, that the American ruling class has made out like bandits simply by
keeping portions of the large (and potentially powerful) working class from
uniting in a single political party behind even a social-democratic program.

And that such a scenario would be nothing short of a disaster for them.

It’s obvious that this kind of popular politics will never
be built if segments of the working class — much less a majority of it — are
written off.

So when I hear liberal pundits saying that white workers are
morally compromised beyond hope or on the way to irrelevance, I tend to get a
little suspicious.

But when those same pundits claim — despite all evidence to
the contrary — that most of these workers are more invested in cultivating
racism than their own material and social emancipation, I think it’s time to
stop listening to them altogether.